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I am a civil engineer and environmental sociologist (currently: Assistant Prof at Georgia Tech) working on ways to make decision making more just, effective, and informed. Specifically, I study how community and societal priorities can be better incorporated into multicriteria policy and project decisions, mainly related to energy, water, and infrastructure systems. I am particularly interested in changing the decision making-paradigm from relying on a decision maker’s value judgments to routinely assessing and incorporating diverse worldviews from affected communities and society at large. If you are here to check in on my study of socioenvironmental priorities in energy-producing communities: welcome, and thank you! You can find more information on that project here.

My community research suggests that water and energy are major priorities, which motivates my other major research focus: I have been studying the water-energy nexus for about 10 years, in part because of energy and water’s crucial roles in societal functioning. My recent effort with Kelly Sanders of USC to characterize the water needs of the US energy system is now published, supporting the finding that 10% of US water is consumed for energy systems with a full Excel workbook including data for 126 unit processes across 17 fuel cycles, in addition to the paper and full documentation. We’re now looking into spatial and temporal aspects of US water for energy.

Methodologically, I use both quantitative and qualitative methods, including life cycle assessment, surveys, interviews, and text mining tools. As a computational social scientist brought up by Stanford’s Literary Laboratory, I’m particularly interested in investigating ways to use computational social science and digital humanities techniques to measure socioenvironmental attitudes expressed in fiction, nonfiction, and both present-day and historical ephemeral texts like community meeting minutes, court cases, newspapers, and social media.

You can find links to and pdfs of my papers here. I’m also on Google Scholar, ResearchGate, and LinkedIn, and enthusiastic about potential collaborations–some of my datasets include survey and interview data from coal-, oil-, natural gas-, and solar-producing communities in the US and Australia, detail on water use for the US energy system, and flow data for US hydropower.